There is no central way to do it in all applications, no. In fact, most do
not support a way to do it per application. :-(

It gets better or worse in Windows 2000 (depending on your point of view) as
it grabs whole clusters when you work per letter, thus Tamil TTA + I and
other ligatures are selected as a unit. Probably worse in your case, since
you may sometimes want to select single letters. :-)

FWIW, in Word, WordPad, OE, and Outlook, I am more of a keyboard person,
especially for selections (sometimes an occupational hazard of development?
<g>). It will respect your starting place if you hold down the shift key as
you arrow around or use home/end or the arrows, and does not do the "word
selection" that you are talking about.

Anyone know how to turn off the extremely annoying automatic word select
(AWS) in Microsoft products? This is the "feature" that causes dragging
outside of a word to behave like double-click. I often want to select part
of a word, such when editing at the start of a sentence. For example, in the
sentence

Only the finest products...

to remove the word "Only" I would click after the first "t", then drag back
to include "Only t", then type a T. I have been doing this for years; to
select words you just double-click.

Excel, FrontPage, Access, Notepad, the desktop (e.g. in filenames), and the
vast majority of non-Microsoft products do the right thing WITHOUT setting
an option.

What I can't do is figure out how to turn off AWS in Internet Explorer,
Outlook Express, Outlook, or WordPad. These products are also -- of
course -- very inconsistent. When selecting characters in the main window,
IE does do AWS. But not in the Address bar, dialog boxes, file selection,
etc. Anyone have an idea?